


Remember

by Gelgoogle



Category: Final Fantasy VII, Kingdom Hearts
Genre: F/M, Let's say the KH characters actually are the FF characters, Prophetic Visions, Reincarnation (maybe), Solipsism, continuity porn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-29
Updated: 2020-04-29
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:22:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23916001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gelgoogle/pseuds/Gelgoogle
Summary: Cloud Strife isn't going insane.(He is, of course, fooling himself.)
Relationships: Aerith Gainsborough/Cloud Strife (mentioned), Tifa Lockhart/Cloud Strife (past)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 26





	Remember

Cloud Strife isn’t going insane.

He has an overactive imagination. That’s all. 

Dreams are a barrage of senseless sights and sounds slurried together from people and places he has seen throughout his day. Of course he dreams about Yuffie and Cid and Aeris.

She laughs. Her voice tinkles like glass. 

Thin. Light. Fragile.

Transparent.

“Aeris?” the flower girl looks up from her lilies. (The flower girl who has never heard words like Midgar or materia.) “No one has called me that in years.” 

* * *

Yuffie steals shiny things.

That’s what happens when you grow up on the streets.

Not in the palatial estates of Wutai. There is no Wutai. It’s something his mind made up to take away the tragedy of their long-lost home and turn it into something glamorous.

A spirited freedom fighter who grew up with parents who loved her is a kinder fate than an orphan-turned-refugee.

He’s being sucked into her childish style of thinking. 

“I’ll be a ninja one day!” she puffs her chest up with pride.

“What’s a ninja?” is what he asks.

_ How do you know that word? _ is what he wants to ask.

There were no ninjas in Radiant Garden.

* * *

He wonders if Cid misses Shera. 

But of course he doesn’t. She’s just another something Cloud’s mind made up because he knows Cid, their accidental caretaker, is lonely.

  
Of course a homesick teenager would want his father-of-sorts to have a wife-of-sorts to soothe his mind and nurture them all in their angst and their hormones.

It’s all just domestic yearning.

Right?

* * *

  
He doesn’t dream about Leon. Not even once.

He takes this as a sign that the dreams don’t mean anything at all.

(He is, of course, fooling himself.)

* * *

It starts to unravel one winter morning when it’s just the two of them in the house. 

Yuffie and Cid are sleeping in.

Leon is on his usual early morning patrol, and Aerith tags along as his self-appointed chaperone. She decided, once upon a time, that Leon should not be allowed to wander the streets alone. He needs someone to watch his back, in spite of how much he insists he doesn’t. 

He wakes up and walks into the kitchen and sees Tifa.

  
Tifa with her long dark hair spilling down her back. Tifa standing over the stove as she prepares another big breakfast for the two of them and Marlene and Denzel. Tifa who stood by him through Geostigma and Deepground and long trips from home and a hundred other trials and tribulations.

So he does what he always does. 

He sidles up behind her, sliding his hands around her hips and pulling her back into him so he can plant a kiss on the crown of his head.

Tifa’s surprised gasp shocks him out of the moment.

Because of course this isn’t their normal.

Of course this isn’t their home in Edge.

Of course they didn’t grow old together and raise a family together. 

“I thought you were someone else.”

* * *

He ransacks Merlin’s workshop. 

He’s looking for answers, but he does not know what shape they will take.

The oft-traveling man has forgotten more about magic than any of them will ever learn. Even Aerith, natural mage that she is. (Aerith, who he saw again just this morning and thought maybe they would have a chance to be together this time now that there is no one to leap from the ceiling and -- no, no, no. Didn’t happen. Won’t ever happen.) 

He remembers his mother, Claudia, telling him stories of dreamwalkers and shapeshifters and a hundred other things that seemed so fantastical until the shadows themselves slithered out of the cold places where even the sun does not touch in search of hearts to soothe their hunger. 

But his mother’s name was Cheryl, wasn’t it? 

He doesn’t know anymore, and that terrifies him.

Because he’s dreaming of someone he has never seen before in the waking world.

  
The man with long, silver hair. 

* * *

He leaves.

* * *

He dreams. He dreams more and more with more vivid colors and more depth and more clarity.

He sees two men with guns, one dark, one pale. He hears a lion-dog-creature that speaks. He smells the burning insulation smell of the moogle machine after it channels the power of Ifrit through the brilliant red orb of materia.

He laughs with them, cries with them, lives with them.

  
They are his family then as much as their (avatars? shadows? reincarnations?) are to him now. 

He loves them all.

He loves them so much he steals Cid’s gummi ship in the dead of night to find the man with the long, silver hair before he finds all of them.

* * *

Cloud takes the prize money and watches as his defeated opponent is dragged off to a fate that may, in fact, be worse than death, but it’s impossible to know. 

And it’s hard to care.

Is this man, this coliseum, this world even real?

Is he the boy from Nibelheim dreaming of Heartless or is he the boy from Nibelheim dreaming of mako? 

He does not know.

But he knows that these familiar faces are precious to him. Always have been, always will be.

So he will kill for them; he will die for them.

When he finds the man with the silver hair, he will kill that phantom or die trying.

The madman will die, or Cloud will die, too dead to draw him toward Aerith and Tifa and Yuffie and Cid ever again. In either case, their story will come to an end, and his loved ones will be all the safter for it.

Maybe not ever entirely safe, not with the Heartless on the prowl, but safer than they would be if he had stayed with them in their crude, cobbled together little family. 

Sephiroth always did have a special place in his heart for tormenting Cloud. He will hunt Cloud and no one else. 

It’s better this way.

(He is, of course, fooling himself.)

* * *

“Cloud,” Sephiroth all but oozes, all these countless years and worlds later. “I knew you would not forget about me.”

Forget. Such a specific choice of words. It speaks volumes, but it falls on deaf ears.

Remember. Reincarnate. Revive. Dream. Forget. 

These words mean nothing to him now. Only the mission. Only the end. 

He used to asked why. Why me? Why the dreams? 

Now he only asks how. How will this all end? How can I keep them safe?

He steadies his sword against Sephiroth for what he already knows is the last time. Win or lose, he will have his resolution. 

Win or lose, he hopes they will be able to forgive him.


End file.
